


I Never Asked For This

by PerfectPurgatory



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: F/M, Nothing is Beautiful and Everything Hurts, Sadness, The Author Regrets Everything, There's no point for Finn and Poe to be in it except for them to hurt, This Could Have Been Avoided, just sadness, they loved each other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-25
Updated: 2017-03-25
Packaged: 2018-10-10 07:00:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,706
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10431783
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PerfectPurgatory/pseuds/PerfectPurgatory
Summary: After the sudden death of Rey, Kylo returns home, if only to return her body.





	

He started dreaming about her shortly after Starkiller. He would dream of her, on that island of hers, dancing around in the salty air, her freckles shining in the sun. He would always keep out of sight, keep his distance. He didn’t want to disturb her, didn’t want to break her concentration. It wasn’t until he tried to speak to her in his dreams that he realized they weren’t just his; they were hers too. It took months of him, begging, for her to talk to him.

Looking down at her now, her freckles were no longer shining. Her sun-kissed skin was now pale with death. The ironic thing was that she still had the faintest smile on her lips, as if she was smirking at him from beyond the grave.

The dreams they shared turned into everyday thoughts. Everyday thoughts turned into feelings, and, well, they turned out to have more things in common than he had originally anticipated. He always seemed to be one notch above her, however. Her anger was his hate. Her fear was his terror. Her sadness was his despair. But her love was something else entirely. Her love was his obsession and his undoing, and he had it, if only for a few short weeks.

Touching down on the opposite side of the planet, he looked at her again. If he closed his eyes and concentrated, he could still remember how her hair smelled after it rained. That smell quickly turned into one of burning flesh and singed hair, however, and he snapped back into reality. There was a task at hand and he had to do it quickly and quietly.

When he finally got to the complex, he had to use mind tricks to get past the guards. It was nighttime, so the hallways were minimally staffed and all he had to do to get past someone was to freeze them and wipe their minds. He finally got to the door, where he was sure his mother was. He could feel his uncle inside as well. Exhausted and getting more frail by the minute, he stiffened when the door was pushed open.

His mother didn’t look surprised when they saw him, but Luke looked horrified. The one thing they didn’t expect, it seems, was Rey, limp and in his arms.

“I didn’t ask for this,” was all Kylo could let out before Luke moved to take her body away. All he did was hold her closer. Stepping into the room, the door closed behind him and all there was was him and his past staring him right in the face.

“Ben, what happened?” Luke was halfway in between him and his mother, who looked petrified.

“She…” He slumped his shoulders a bit, a hint of his exhaustion. He had, in fact, carried her a long way. The kind of emotional trauma that comes with carrying a dead loved one across a planet would have caused almost anyone to fall to their knees by now. “She sacrificed herself in battle.”

Both Luke and General Organa knew what the unspoken words were. She sacrificed herself to save him. Kylo gently laid her down on the bed in the room, gently pushing her hair off of her face and placing her hands across her chest. He looked up at his mother, who hadn’t said a word but only stared at him, tears in her eyes. She looked like she wanted to reach out to him. It had been years since she had truly seen him.

Looking next at Luke, Kylo’s blood ran cold as harsh realization hit him. “You knew.” It was a threatening accusation.

“It was either you or her. And I didn’t know.” Luke sounded resigned.

“You knew!” He was yelling. If the base wasn’t alerted to his presence before, it certainly was now. Fists at his side, he was simultaneously happy and angry that he left his lightsaber. It was a difficult decision, but he meant for his presence to be a peace offering, not a death sentence, although it would most likely prove to be. Luke’s face was calm in the face of his infuriated nephew. “You let her go into battle, and you knew!”

Armed guards burst through the door. The chief one being Poe Dameron and Finn. Looking down at the bed, their faces hardened and they trained their guns on him with even more determination than before.

“He’s not armed.” Leia seemed to try and put on the face of the general instead of the face of a broken mother that she had on only moments before.  
Grabbing his arms, they violently tugged him. It wasn’t until they started physically walking him out of the room that he started pushing towards Luke.  
“You let her die!” Someone put a blaster to his back as they started shoving him out of the room. “I hate you! You let her die. You knew!” He was still yelling as they took him down the hallway to the holding cells.

For the next few days, all he could do was stare at the wall of his newfound prison. He tried to sleep, once, but quickly woke up in a cold sweat at the absence of Rey.

It all happened so fast. She had found him in battle. Snoke had told him that he would meet his downfall. He had foreseen his death and didn’t seem to have much faith in him overcoming it. Kylo had assumed that she would best him in battle, again, and he was prepared. Even though they had feelings for each other, he figured that she would have to kill him. She was on the opposite side of the war. It was expected. Never in a million lightyears would be have thought that she would put herself in the line of fire for him, of all people.

The night before the battle, they had been lying in his bed, next to each other. Not physically, but mentally caressing each other in a slow and methodical way. He had told her that he never meant for this to happen. He never dreamed that he would ever meet somebody like her. He had dreamed of someone less loveable, perhaps. Someone with less charm and a less contagious laugh. He had thought that the girl Snoke told him of would have been way less beautiful than Rey was. She was like a cool spring breeze on a warm day on Naboo. She was his ideal, in every way. A spirit to match his own. Her righteous anger pulled him in like a magnet, and her unconditional love for those she was loyal to astounded him and magnetized him all the more.

She had asked him to come home. He had briefly considered it before he pushed her away and accused her of being a mere messenger of his mother.  
“I have no home,” he had said.

“Let me be your home, then.” And she had meant it. She wanted a future with him that didn’t involve death and destruction. The problem was, he did too.

  
It was only logical, after pushing her away, that she would come into battle to smite him down. That’s what he told himself.

After her body went limp and her face stared blankly up at the sky, Kylo had killed every person in the vicinity. Every Stormtrooper, every Resistance fighter, every last one of them was lying on the ground. Finally walking up to her body, it hit him. Snoke was right. He had surely met his downfall, and she was lying, broken by a blaster bolt to the head, on the cold ground.

“I never meant for this to happen.” He knelt and gingerly scooped her up. “You were never supposed to love me. I was never…” He knew. Somehow, he knew that he was the one that was supposed to die on the battlefield, not her. It had to be. After all the things he’d done, after breaking the heart of his mother, running his lightsaber through the heart of his father, and all the failures in between, it was a cruel joke that it was her and not him. He deserved it. She had done nothing wrong. Nothing except love him. Apparently, loving him was a death sentence. And he would never make that mistake again.

He wondered if they put flowers in her hair when they put her on her funeral pyre. For that matter, he wondered if they had even used the traditional Jedi funeral pyre for her. He wondered if those who were there truly loved her, like he had. He knew the answer must have been yes. He could hardly imagine someone coming into contact with her and not loving her.

It was supposed to be him. He didn’t ask for this. He didn’t ask to fall in love with her and he certainly never asked her to die for him. Through her death, she got what she wanted, though. He thought bitterly about it. He was home, for all intents and purposes. She had brought him home and saved him. The world was a dark and cruel place and she was the only one who could have saved him.

The assumption was that Kylo Ren killed Rey. That was the rumor being spread around the base. And, in a way, it was true. If it hadn’t been for him, she would still be living. What irony, he thought. They were the downfall of each other.

It was a week later that he was scheduled for execution. His mother didn’t attend. Before he went to the firing squad he was asked if he had any last words. The only thing he had been thinking, the only thing he could say, was “I never meant for this to happen.”

He closed his eyes one last time, imagining the scent of salt water, imagining the shine of her freckles and the exact width of her smile. Just as he started truly living when he first dreamed of her, he died dreaming of her. It was a peaceful death. A shot to the head, just like her. He never asked for any of this, but he got it anyway.


End file.
